Writing in the Ruins

If you grew up in East Germany, a country whose national anthem began, “Resurrected from the ruins, faces toward the future turned,” you might find a landscape covered in shards to be almost natural—the broken past coexisting alongside an emerging world of concrete and glass. Those ruins might even inspire an unabashed love, as they have in the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, born in that now-extinct country in 1967. “Steel girders. Charred beams. Walls with nothing behind them,” she writes in an essay. “Rooms where the rain falls on dead pigeons because there isn’t a roof overhead.” These are a few of her favorite things.

For Erpenbeck, who ranks among Germany’s most acclaimed writers (and is frequently mentioned as a future Nobel contender), this love comes with an ethic, one that suffuses her fiction. In an essay called “Homesick for Sadness,” included in Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces, she describes how she felt when she learned that her GDR-era elementary school, which had been abandoned and left to crumble in the middle of Berlin, was finally being demolished. Her grief had two stages. When the school began to decompose, she felt the personal loss of a place that had once housed her childhood. But with the arrival of bulldozers to clear the rubble and erase the remnants, she was overcome by “grief for the disappearance of a place that was such a visible injury, for the disappearance of sick or disturbed things or spaces, which offer proof that the present can’t make its peace with everything.”

This is a very postwar-German sentiment, and Erpenbeck is a very postwar-German writer. In her professed “love of dirt,” she follows and Günter Grass. For these authors, history is not compressed strata; layers of the past surround them, a constant atmosphere,, describes the East Berlin of the 1980s very much in his author’s terms: Inhabiting a place where the past is visible everywhere, exposed and rotting, he concludes that “this devastation was the truth.”